Sissy Fatigue

Marketing: Sissy Fatigue

Bradley Cooper's muscling away the Johnny Depps

By Ted Byrne

Ted hangs at Madam T's in NYC

Look, it’s a transitory impulse of adolescents to get weaned. They’re hard-wired to a hormonal clock set to irritate parents enough to kick them out of the nest. Johnny Depp nurtures the irritation-instinct, hell, he’s its avatar. He’s an opiate of the mass-less teenager yearning for some weight … He’s pushing credibility in eye-liner form as opposed to muscular-function.

Johnny Depp’s a simpering wedge-issue. His mask seems to hide a seething complexity where some adolescents can find reason and rules to become naturally obnoxious.

Humans are masters of going dysfunctional. Think about it. We have to eat, but big clots of folks get eating disorders, we need relaxation which many convert to addictions. Survival requires sex and, well … don’t even go there.

Depp’s plugged into the irritant compulsion that normally appears then dissipates as we shed the stages of our lives. If it doesn’t dissolve … When adolescence becomes persistent among some … its symptoms are as aberrant as bulimia. Depp’s found his market in that peculiarity and spent a career nurturing, extending, and legitimatizing it. He’s the bad-boy of nasty.

Sissy-ness is an affectation of people independent of their sexual preferences. In a lot of ways it’s the neurotic extension of a natural tendency to reject the extreme (and equally neurotic) stereotypes of manliness. Normal personalities wobble both left and right of the center of the range between subordination and independence. The sissy stands at one end of the scale, macho at the other.

Over the last half century, women, particularly educated women, have moved toward economic, and hence personal, independence. Which has replaced their dependency upon a provider with a need for encouragement. At the Depp extreme, a soft, cosmetic-ized partner is less a competitor than he is a girl-friend with benefits. The appeal of the sissy is an inverse function of the income potential of a mate. Strong men (of any gender preference) at the extreme gravitate as readily to some degree of the girly-girl as strong women (of any gender preference) find fascination in some degree of sissy.

Now the entertainment industry feeds upon niches. There’re only so many non-working hours available for music, food, reading, viewing, rooting, risking, sleeping, and mating. It’s a zero sum game. Of the 350 million or so American consumers, a 10 share is 35 million. Sell each of them, say $100 worth of something a year and we’re talking billions. Unsurprisingly Hollywood, both in movies and TV, have imagined that the semi-sissy niche is filled with a potential audience of millions of up-market women. And a short-list of profitable romantic movies over the past few decades presents a cascade of male leads morphing from Steve McQueen/Paul Newman to Hugh Grant/Johnny Depp.

How far’s this all gone? Have you noticed the roles played by Oscar’s Best Actor nominees this year (2015)? And have you noticed the box-office for their movies? One, “American Sniper” has in just a few weeks amassed more ticket receipts than all of the others added together. Each of the nominees’ movies are about men. Each is about the way they deal with relationships.

It’s not as if Sniper has found just one profitable marginal niche. It’s apparently rediscovered a significant sissy-fatigue on the part of audiences. Just as family movies have rebounded profitably, particularly in the animated world, and hulking hunks of men are dominating the action/adventure blockbusters of summer, now a lower budget movie like Sniper’s hit a mainstream target. And this time at the direct expense of Johnny Depp’s simultaneous appearance in the box-office bomb, Mordecai, Depp’s fifth big-budget failure in five years.

In fact, if you take Alice In Wonderland, and Pirates of the Caribbean from Depp’s last eight movies you’re left with Depp-charges that returned a MINUS 6.2% on each dollar spent by backers. The bombs are so startling—the theory is he’s auditioning for a gig in Clint Eastwood’s sound-crew.

Remember 2004? That was the year that a somewhat sissy Jude Law opened as the lead in: Alfie, Closer, The Aviator, Sky Captain, and Lemony Snicket. Of course you’re forgiven if you didn’t know, virtually no one did, nor came to those flicks. Law carpet bombed! Since then the guy’s bulked up his shoulders, and washed off the eyeliner, but ten years later he’s still waiting for another top-star role.

Entertainment green-lighters have compromised on a Michael Cera/Ronan Farrow/Oberlin College kind of sweet sissy (remember “Pajama Boy” in his onesie-zip-ups with an eternally adolescent cocoa-smirk over Obamacare?) and with some niche success especially in TV’s Glee, Smash, and About A Boy. I write “niche success” since over the past five years CBS has ruled the ratings with scripted dramas predominately starring strong action (along with relationship driven) males and females. And with the exception of Fox, the top rated scripted dramas on the other nets (NBC’s Blacklist, ABC’s Castle) are built around robust men-of-action … is it the loss of a Kiefer Sutherland’s 24 that explains Fox’s present rating collapse?

There’s a narrative among the C-level media suits about a need for sissy product where, it’s been said, the rule of law is replaced by the rule of psychotherapy. Perhaps the need is based upon a desire to affect social change, or perhaps it’s based upon a misread of audiences who pay to watch heroes reeking of sweat and gunshot residue. Regardless, the success of America Sniper repudiates the PC narrative. Hugh Grant and Johnny Depp are both aging and sissy fatigue’s set in as Gen X and Y leave adolescence way behind. Look for tiny budget, art and niche films, to carry on the sissy narrative this year starring soft-male leads who will continue to get politically-correct award nominations in 2016. But their commercial irrelevancy will grow as the box office prizes seek out; stories like Chris Kyle’s in Sniper, traditionalist directors like Eastwood, and burley-male-leads like Bradley Cooper—not boys but men who are competent to do things that are decisive, productive, and vital.    

Manage Mistakes: What is terminal stupidity?

Manage Mistakes

Just what is terminal stupidity?

By A Business2Business Roundtable

Date Published: 9/1/2014

The diner swallowed her first spoonful of the restaurant’s soup. “Oh.…” Eyes snapping wide, a hand covering her mouth. “Uhhh … it’s … it’s burning my lips.” Tearing, her words hoarse, she struggled to clear her throat. “Uh … MY GOD!” she screamed pushing back from the table, blood seeping below the palm covering her mouth. Before passing out, the woman coughed violently, spraying blood over horrified friends.… 

An investigation later revealed that a kitchen worker mistakenly mixed a plumbing fluid containing the crystal form of lye, sodium nitrate, sodium chloride, and aluminum into the water used to prepare the customer’s broth. The victim’s alive but burns destroyed her voice box along with a significant part of her mouth and larynx. 

“Let him who is without mistake cast the first pink slip.” 

—Poor paraphrase

Dictionary.com defines mistake: “An error in action, calculation, opinion, or judgment caused by poor reasoning, carelessness, insufficient knowledge, etc.” The investigators of the woman’s tragic poisoning concluded that there was no intent on the employee’s part to cause distress to anyone. She thought that the sink where she spilled the residue of the toxic substance was empty, failing to see the pan with water that was later used in the soup’s preparation. 

Intent versus action … what does a manager judge when considering the appropriate reaction to an employee’s mistake? In this litigious world, we asked a panel of our own Business2Business Magazine experts for their advice on their conclusions to the question, How to manage mistakes?

Our Business2Business Magazine panel of management experts: Leadership writer Shawn Doyle, HR writer Ira Wolfe, Life Lessons writer Steve Cornibert, publisher Steve Schulz, and editor Ted Byrne represent over a century of combined management experience. 

“Some of the worst mistakes in my life were haircuts.” 

—Jim Morrison

“It’s important to remember two things here,” Ted Byrne began. “First off, we’re dealing with the personnel issue, the after-the-fact moments when managers work with the employee who erred. And secondly, we’re discussing mistakes that occurred without any intention to create mischief.” 

“Yeah, make that clear,” Shawn Doyle added. “These are not cases that call for reprimand nor punishment. What’s important is managing outcomes.” 

“Right,” Ted agreed to nods around the table, “Manager’s manage, they aren’t in the ‘justice’ or blame business. Their job is to maximize successful outcomes—outcomes upon which they themselves are evaluated.”

“Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.” 

—Rita Mae Brown, Alma Mater

“For me,” Steve Cornibert put in, “it’s important to clarify the word mistake. Some might argue, for example, that it is a mistake to falsify production sheets, or time reports. Actually, that’s fraud. There, intent is crucial. Instead what’s important here is the mistake of, say, spilling coffee ruinously over a keypad, or entering the wrong information onto a critical shipping label. Once upon a time in college I recall learning that when you have an employee with goals that differed from your organization their mistakes can be terminal, when their values match the organization’s … tolerate them. It’s been a useful perspective.”

“Those that don’t make mistakes, don’t make nothin’.” 

—Peter Drucker

“There are those who wonder who owns a mistake, the employee who made it,” Ira Wolfe added, “or the management process that allowed it? I recall that Warren Buffet taught us, ‘A manager gets people to do what he wants them to do, while a leader gets people to want to do what he wants them to do.’

Leaders will get people to internalize the negative impact of a mistake. But, management mustn’t become so draconian that it attempts to make mistakes impossible. You want people to have a growth mindset, not just to do good but to do better … to try. Trying will result in some mistakes.”

“Uh-huh, that’s the narrow line,” Steve Schulz concurred. “The one between encouraging growth and shutting it down along with morale. When tolerance disappears so does incentive.”

“I never made a mistake in my life; at least, never one that I couldn’t explain away afterwards.” 

—Rudyard Kipling, Under the Deodars

“But,” Ted Byrne asked, “at the core of things, is there such a thing as a terminal mistake? A firing offense, regardless of intent?”

“Depends upon the Reasonable Person Standard,” Shawn Doyle replied. “Did the error occur in an egregious violation of well defined HR policy? There are some mistakes … which everyone agrees … to which a ‘Reasonable Person’ would conclude … resulted from behavior that was not just unwise but that resulted in a financial, liability, and safety impact that is intolerable: Someone tossing lye carelessly into a common sink, for example. A Reasonable Person would conclude firing that employee is not a punishment, it’s more like self defense. People can be terminally stupid.”

“I can recall firing a manager,” Ted Byrne added, “who was a serial mistake maker. But it wasn’t any one of his mistakes that triggered the decision, rather it was my conclusion that I couldn’t manage him. And since managers are hired to manage toward successful outcomes, I concluded that he made my job impossible.”

“There are companies who have the Three Mistake Rule.” Shawn Doyle said. “If any three are made in a certain period of time, the employee is out regardless of intent or circumstances.”

“Smart people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” 

—Brandon Mull, Fablehaven

“Yeah,” Ted Byrne agreed. “I recall working for a major television broadcasting network which only hired graduate engineers to operate their central boards. If they were responsible for three mistakes in a twelve month period which affected the transmission of network material in real-time, they were terminated and their union contracts were no protection. At their level the dollar costs were enormous.”

Ira Wolfe agreed, “There are minor mistakes with major consequences. And it’s not unusual that management sanctions an employee not because of a mistake but because it resulted from carelessness. But be careful here, management is not in the punishment business. Punishment is an emotional response. Management seeks instead to hold people responsible for their responsibilities. No good will come of punishment, managers need to manage their emotions to manage outcomes.”

“There is nothing wrong with making mistakes, but one should always make new ones. Repeating mistakes is a hallmark of dim consciousness.” 

—Dave Sim

“Effective managers connect actions with consequences in the minds of their people,” Steve Cornibert said. “If someone is dumb enough to smoke dope each morning they’ll be fired eventually but not for smoking dope. Very often a problem fires itself. We can’t forget though that just as often a mistake has value as a teachable moment. If you mistakenly forget to set a limit to a company’s production oven’s temperature then go home for the night, the arrival of the fire company will teach you what never to do again.” 

Ira Wolfe went on, “We live in a litigious time where the Act of God or the Sh*t Happens defense no longer works to defend a company against liabilities for an unintended error … a mistake. If you want your workforce to do what you want them to do, guidelines and rules are necessary. Plus your lawyer might need them in a civil suit resulting from a mistake. Tolerance for the stupid and ignorant mistake is situational. It depends a lot upon its impact.”

“We learn from failure, not from success!” 

—Bram Stoker, Dracula

“And a lot does depend upon the attitude of the person afterward. Remorse will affect things. The trouble comes,” Shawn Doyle warned, “in judging the sincerity of the employee’s response. In fact, it’s equally important to judge how instructive the results of the mistake were. A management overreaction can kick up the costs to morale. And mandatory sentencing, so to speak, will limit employee growth.”

“We can learn from mistakes before we make them.” 

—Anon

“There’s one lesson I’ve learned about all of this over the years,” Steve Schulz concluded. “Serial mistakes are a management problem.”

“A bachelor is a guy who never made the same mistake once.” 

—Phyllis Diller

Obama Care: Now What?

The 2014 impact on business

By Ted Byrne

Maybe the Affordable Health Care Act’s (ACA) employer mandate will kick in during 2014 as company’s roll heath benefit plans into 2015. So? Suppose I was a meteorologist, and you wanted a medium-range prediction. Well, after talking with ACA experts throughout our region and nation there is some benefit-storm-warning that’s increasingly obvious. 


Here’s what Business2Business magazines predicts is most likely to affect employers as they make health benefit decisions this year. Oh yeah, notice that first word maybe up there? It’s not probable, but experts say that with 2014 elections looming, there’s a real chance that the ACA as we know it - and the employer mandate in particular - is all subject to big-time revision and postponement by mid-year which will certainly affect any or all of these projections.

Oh, one more point. Notice that I’ve broken out sections below into digestible bullet points. As the many executives, analysts, and experts I spoke with made clear, it’s not accidental that they think of the consequences of all of this in terms of… Bullets. 

• COSTS: Overall, the costs of 2015 health benefit replacement plans will continue upward as they’re revealed through 2014. Costs, however, are not the same things as rates. Look, suppose that apartment rents rise. As a consequence some renters will choose to move down-market. Yep, they can keep rents constant but at the cost of neighborhoods, school systems, parking, square footage, appliances, plumbing, storage, gyms, pools, views, or whatever. Commuting becomes more expensive along with transport to everything related to a life-style. Perhaps utilities or insurance burdens get heavier. Costs then combine price and benefits.

It is black-letter law (as they say on Law & Order) that employers will not be able to renew their pre ACA plans again for 2015, unless those plans are grandfathered. That means they haven’t changed substantially since the ACA came to be in 2010. “No,” a CEO of a sizeable Capital Region manufacturer concludes that, “regardless of pledges and promises, whether they liked them or not, most employers and their employees who have rolled into any new policies since 2010 will not be able to keep their plans.” “In Fact,” Kelly Lieblein, the regional vice president High Mark Blue Shield concludes that, “by year’s end every employer will be affected.” There are two major components then of health benefit costs which employers and employees can expect to see changing as policies roll throughout this year:

(1) Rates: Forces are at work to inflate 2015 health benefit premiums (prices).

• Analysts expect overall pressure upon premiums to rise under the law next year for most small-group plans because of the way ACA defines “minimal essential coverage” in terms of new fees, taxes and a requirement that 10 essential areas be covered. These include maternity care, substance abuse, mental-health services and prescription-drug coverage, which aren't standard in a large percentage of small employer policies today.

• Jim Schmucker, president of the Lancaster County Business Group on Health explains that the ACA redefines “actuarial value” such that insurers may no longer develop an average risk for an employer based upon the impact of factors that contribute to usage of benefits. Rather rates will have to be age-banded so each worker will be rated based only upon age and smoking habits. “And since,” Jim Schmucker continues, “workers must be rated individually, from here on new hires will affect rates immediately and firms will see their monthly costs vary. At the same time, firms who demand worker contributions will have to recalculate those individual payroll deductions regularly resulting in a considerable planning and bookkeeping challenge particularly to small and/or high turnover firms with fewer than 50 employees with fewer resources to cope.”

• Thiere’s a curious misalignment of forces inherent within the ACA. On the one hand firms with larger percentages of older, sicker, and female workers have faced higher health benefit rates in the past. Those are characteristics associated with higher usage of benefits. Now gender, pre-existing conditions, and health problems may no longer be used by insurers in computing risk. Which means that on the first round of ACA those firms will enjoy the most moderate hikes while the younger and healthier firms will take up the slack.

• But Jim Schmucker explains this all means that, “older workers will become more expensive.” As a result of the new limits upon “actuarial value” younger firms in the future will have advantages come renewal time. So older, sicker, more female firms make out this year, older firms pay in coming years. Tongue-in-cheek, an area analyst mused that the best of all rate experiences could come to the firm with a large percentage of ill and women workers in 2014 who will retire (or can be retired) next year to be replaced by very young workers of any gender going forward into 2016. Old workers will cost more.

• A point here about discrimination. Females tend to use more health benefits than their male counterparts, explaining why their rates were higher. Older workers tend to do the same, explaining why their benefit rates are higher. In markets, people who buy more, spend more. A political decision was made in the ACA to call the costs women paid for their higher usage, discriminatory however the law continues to allow age to determine prices for older workers. Strictly speaking, of course, the law’s definition is correct. Prices are supposed to discriminate. It’s their job to ration scarce resources.

Usage makes things more scarce. As New York City discovered, new middle and lower income apartments disappeared from the market when government set rent control ceilings to stop landlords from discriminating against middle and low income renters.  The price of health care benefits is just as discriminatory upon the older worker as to the female worker – prices are age and gender blind. However, neither political party has yet been charged with a war against the mature, but each is frantic to end the war against women. You’ve got to wonder what politicians will do when they discover short-skirted women feel winter more than long-pants men?

• Title VII of the Civil Rights Act prohibits discrimination in employment based upon race, sex, national origin, or religion. That was expanded by the Age Discrimination Act of 1965 which “prohibits arbitrary age discrimination of older persons.” The Labor Department’s the enforcer. The ACA however specifically permits employers who share the costs of their health benefits with employees to charge older workers as much as three times the rate of younger workers, as a result of the risk rating of individual employees. OOOPS!

A state official told us off the record,  “Watch for President Obama to use his Executive Order pen very soon to clarify this tension between the two laws in favor of discriminating against the older worker’s rates.” Look for law suites against this clarification with the possibility of the employer who chooses to follow either one of these legal mandates caught painfully between their jaws. One wonders if males will have a similar basis for suit based upon the spike in their rates to make up for the decreasing rates for females. And oddly, since employers cannot charge older workers more than 300% of younger worker rates, and since that differential is arbitrary and quite possibly not enough to actually cover their usage – analysts wonder if younger workers in general and males in particular might also sue for age discrimination and gender discrimination since they will be forced to bear those unsupported costs of both older and female workers.

• Since firms will pay a penalty for employing older workers. Will they be less likely to hire and retain them, particularly among low wage and part-time workers who compose their full-time-equivalent workers (see the ACA FAQs sidebar)? Look for financial and human resource managers to model age heavily into their critical path strategies. How will all of this get policed? Quotas? Both the Civil Rights Act and the Age Discrimination Act will buy a lot of orthodontics for the children of lawyers.

• The ACA is designed to increase the use of scarce health resources, which will increase their price. Consequential increases in Medicaid enrollment will add to that demand everywhere but less so here in Pennsylvania unless the Commonwealth joins the 25 states plus DC in Medicaid expansion that’s encouraged short-term by subsidies in the ACA. Changes in the structure of the health industry will continue to contribute to the costs of care as the transition continues among insurers and providers scrambling to create networks (see classification for health car providers on the ACA FAQs side bar). While it’s not clear how business premiums will change for 2015 their costs will be more evenly spread as employers with younger workers bear the impact of the ACA’s rate-compression.

• Look for low-wage employees who receive benefits to feel the impact particularly in the hospitality, retail, business service, and dining industries.

(2) Benefits: As with buyers faced with higher rents, employers will hunt for ways to reduce the premium prices by sharing or passing their burden much as they did with the restructuring of pensions from defined benefits to defined contributions. 

• Employee contributions: At a health benefit seminar I chaired last Fall I asked the panel what percentage of contribution experts projected employees nationally would soon contribute toward the price of their health care premiums. 35% was the rate that employers were working toward. With contributions among private employers in our market still south of 20%, look for employers to find room to shift some significant percentage of the premiums to employees. However, since the ACA specifically demands at least one plan among those offered to be capped at 9.5% of “employee household income,” this rate of sharing will become progressive rather quickly resulting in different employees charged sometimes quite significantly different amounts for their coverage depending upon their incomes.

• BTW, one of the President’s pen strokes resulted in the IRS arbitrarily redefining that word, “household” to personal income. This of course will mean that higher income workers will bear a disproportionate burden of the price at any business that requires employee contributions. It’s also possible, for example, that a low-wage employee might have a high income spouse and consequently a significant household income.  However the employee’s contribution toward an individual or a variant of a family plan can be capped at 9.5% of the worker in that household with the lowest wage.

• At any rate, the employer working to maintain an overall 20% contribution from employees will have to do some elaborate computations based upon the amount levied to the employee as a 9.5% piece of that employee’s wages. Question, what happens if an employee receives a bonus or raise during the term of a policy? Accountants and other consultants-with-calculators are also poised to afford a lot of children’s orthodontics. Suffice it to say that the ability of an employer to blunt the ACA’s burden through employee contribution has become a lot more complex.

• Forget Wellness? In addition to shifting a part of premium cost to employee contributions, employers used to haggle over the actuarial value of their insured. They got the risk down by getting employees healthier. Wellness programs sprung up. Experts now say, “forget wellness”! Under the ACA’s redefinition of “actuarial value” insurers can no longer look at pre existing conditions, gender, or fitness, only age and smoking. “So,.” Jim Schucker wonders, “when it comes to wellness, why bother?” He goes on to add that yes, there is an argument that wellness programs enhance productivity by decreasing absenteeism, and growing both physical and mental dexterity along with the psychic rewards of happier healthier workers.

But a number of CEOs have recently told us that wellness benefits were difficult to measure before insurers encouraged wellness as an actuarial fact they could spread across large numbers of enrollees from many firms. Executives remind us of that the old adage, “What you can’t measure you can’t manage” will be applied to wellness whose benefits are, at the bottom line, un-measurable. But their costs are. Experts predict that enthusiasm for wellness programs will quickly dissipate among top management where support is essential to their success. One way of paying higher premiums will be the re-distribution of wellness costs. “However,” Kelly Lieblein reminds us, “there are still personal incentives built into the ACA with preventative tests part of the ten essential areas of required coverage to encourage healthy life styles and behavior.”

• Beyond price sharing with employees, employers will continue to negotiate lower premiums by shifting the cost of benefit packages in other ways. Ways like higher deductibles and co-pays, reduced services, and skinnier networks composed of least cost providers. A glance at the FAQ sidebar will refresh readers whose eyes glaze from the acronym drone of: HMO, PPO, POS, EPO, FFS, STH, and SHOP. What’s important is that each of these offers employers negotiating room over the costs of their plans by moving their employee furniture around or even dropping some of it out the window entirely. Just as those renters gave up square footage to control rents, many employees will give back in terms of co-pays, deductibles, services, and… it’s redundant to point out that promises to voters about keeping their doctors as a result of the ACA were… well… premature.

• Drop Benefits? As the FAQs make clear, those who employ more than 49 full time equivalent workers will have to offer benefits or pay fines. Will the benefit costs exceed those fines for employers? If they do, will they cut all of their employees loose? Will they instead offer plans that exceed 9.5% of some employees’ wages and pay the fine just for those who flee to the exchanges? Will they offer key employees a bonus large enough to cover what would have been their health insurance costs and send all the others off to the exchanges? Or will they seek out some skinny plan conforming to the letter of the ACA. Yet its high deductibles and/or co-pays and restrictions upon access will be in “affordability” conformance but will drive employees to the exchanges where they will be denied subsidies since they refused a conforming plan? In this case the employer will be faced with no fine since the plan conforms to the ACA even though unacceptable to the employee.

The irony, an SVP for one of Dauphin County’s prominent employers finds in all of this, is that those with the lowest incomes who the ACA was intended to support will find themselves with the most primitive options or facing fine with no coverage at all while increasing the numbers of the uninsured. Firms like UPS and Target have announced radical changes in their health care benefit packages. Throughout 214 those choices will interest employers here in Central Pennsylvania. “I wonder,” Kelly Lieblein of Highmark muses, “when faced with some choices if it will be employers or employees who will flee the field?”

• Prudent Man Lawsuits? Jim Schmucker reminds us that some firms which switched from defined benefit pension programs to defined contribution plans have been sued when the plans they chose to manage employee benefits performed behind the market. It was argued, sometimes successfully, that the employer failed the “prudent man” test for fiduciary responsibility in making the choice. Similarly Jim Schmucker reports on experts who argue that such suits might be brought by employees charging that a chosen health care provider failed to meet some “common” or “prudent” standard of market coverage. Once more orthodontists are smiling.

Many CEOs learned a harsh lesson in 2008 about their ability to carry employees whose wages, and benefits grew too heavy. Many of them were in denial until markets forced draconian decisions as late as last year. Bankruptcy made the decision for many who waited too long. Markets have recovered, but executives who grew up in the frivolous 90s are not the same people. The contraction of 2008 scraped away at decisions that could not be supported by revenues. Recession taught them that they could create only jobs and benefits that buyers supported, and not vice-versa. That memory will explain harsh decisions this year. It already has in terms of cuts in hours, and caution regarding full time hiring. Drilling into the numbers reveals a historically large percentage of employed now in part-time jobs without any benefits.

What are some of the early warnings for health benefit decisions in 2014? As a direct result of the ACA, many employees, probably most, will not keep their health care plans into 2015. Rising premiums will be shared by increased employee contributions. Part time jobs will grow just as health benefits will make low productivity jobs more expensive than automating them away. Wellness plans will lose support. Young employees and the lowest income employees will get the largest immediate bills. Older workers will feel the employment pinch in 2016 and beyond. Employers don’t want to crimp their employees’ life-styles. But networks will reduce provider access. Employers don’t want to squeeze take-home pay or the value of the dollars from that income by detouring it into health care co-pays and deductibles.

The fact is though, that in 2014, many of you… will.

Recreational Education - Who Pays?

Some want football tickets, others poetry readings.

And the difference is?

What Is Recreational Education?

Metrics Column • July 2014

By Ted Byrne, editor & economist

Business2Business Magazines

It was probably Anne Isabella Ritchie in the 1880s who first wrote, “Give me a fish and I eat for a day, teach me to fish and I eat for a lifetime.” The lady understood the difference between consumption and investment. Investment produces more goods and services while consumption ends the process. A capital good is a tool that’s used to produce other things, sometimes consumer goods. There are two types of education, investment education and consumption education. You can give Johnny and Jane an appreciation for music, or you can teach them to make it. In the first case they become more accomplished consumers of music, in the second they make music for consumers. In fact, there are many artists who believe that you cannot be an artist until you have an audience. They argue that say, Emily Dickinson, was not a poet until her work was discovered posthumously and published. 

It’s said that mass education in America has three major functions; to socialize students, to create a skilled work force, and to create critical thinkers. That first … the socializing thing … essentially means to assimilate youth into the American culture so that they’re aware of whatever we think is anti-social at any given moment, and consequently have them, well, not do stuff like that. Serious folks call that the acculturation process. We do that in almost all of the curriculum but it’s strongest dosage is contained in the arts and humanities courses like history, literature, government, and the like. It’s particularly used to make little boys behave more like little girls by sort of sedating their aggressiveness with the manners of novels written to entertain women during the 19th century. That curriculum is heavy on the “moral-of-the-story” which is usually consistent with the Golden Rule, or that good-triumphs-in-the-end. Like that.

The second big job of mass education, and the one that its consumers most willingly pay for, is skill creation. 

Warning, here’s a digression. Consumers of any good or service are the people who pay for it. Consequently neither students, nor their parents, are consumers of K-12 public education. They are its product. Be very careful about this point, it’s crucial. Overwhelmingly those who pay for public education are taxpayers. They are its consumers.

Now back to my point about skill creation. Taxpayers, more or less willingly, pay for skill creation, as an investment in the creation of further goods and services. They expect a return on their money, and consequently that is what politicians and public educators promise them. From the days of Thaddeus Stevens, arguably the father of public education in America, the argument for a significant redistribution of money from taxpayers to educators was that the product of K-12 would be an investment good: An investment in human capital. 

That human capital component … that return on the taxpayer’s investment … might be in more nurses, engineers, and mechanics, AND it might be in an overwhelming group of graduates who are less likely to be socially or even criminally disruptive … the acculturation thing. In both of those cases taxpayers can measure, either in employment data, or in criminal justice data, the return on their investment. 

Then there’s the third “function” of mass education: Critical thinking. 

It’s hard to nail down its definition. In a way it’s like U.S. Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s legendary definition of obscenity when he wrote that it’s difficult to define, but you knows it when you sees it. After reading scores of definitions by learned scholars it seems as if critical thinking guides beliefs and seeks answers, actions, and conclusion through the evaluation of observation, experience, reflection, reasoning and communication. It teaches how to test beliefs against facts in order to act rationally. And that it is not only a usefully productive tool, but results in students who are more adaptive over a lifetime of workplace change. It’s supposed to be like creating logical umbrellas to open-up against emotional storms. (Does critical thinking create more adaptable graduates? I’ve analyzed mid career salaries of graduates in an article on our website,How Much Do College Grads Earn? 2013–14 Mid-Career salaries by college major—revealed at www.business2businessonline.com)

Remember now, it’s the keepers of the Arts and Humanities, who are in charge of revealing the morals of the stories used to civilize our little savages. Beyond teaching the very basic skills of literacy, the rest of the expenditures made on these disciplines involves that acculturation thing. Consequently, Arts and Humanities educators argue that critical thought is the other “skill” which they impart to their charges. In fact, to hear scholars in Liberal Arts tell it, you’d think that it was their monopoly.

In fact strategic thinking is an essential component of skill education … whether it be vocational or professional. According to experts, strategic thinking seeks innovation and imagines new and very different futures that may lead to redefining core beliefs and even life’s purpose. Strategic planning then supports strategies developed through strategic thinking to accomplish those beliefs and purposes. Strategic thinking not only involves the essentials of critical thought but deliberately separates planning from action. It clearly separates strategy developed from the evaluation of fact from rational tactics that are its result. Moreover there is no evidence that mastery in strategic thought renders students less adaptable to changing environments. In fact workplace success of engineers, lawyers, doctors, economists, and scientists seems to reveal exactly the opposite. A significant percent of the successful entrepreneurs in our markets boast technical training and degrees.

It’s pretty clear that the consumers of public education think they are paying for the development of strategicthinking when they are being sold critical thinking instead. And it’s also obvious that the Arts and Humanities folks neither have a monopoly on preparing informed and rational graduates, nor necessarily the best method in achieving that preparation. It’s probable that by third or fourth grade that the acculturation process can be handed off from the keepers-of-story-morals to the vocational and professional skill educators who can, and probably should, combine training in rational decision making with specific training in order to maximize the taxpayers investment in K-12 education.

Which brings us to higher education. 

We hear politicians argue for ever-increasing “investments” in education at every level, but rarely do we hear specific tactics to increase the rate of return to education’s consumers, the taxpayers. We do know that increasing rigor results in increasing dropout rates, and vice versa. We also know that remedial instruction (most frequently in literacy, scientific, and analytical tools) is a larger cost to colleges and universities than ever before in history. Which is a clear indication of the decreasing return on that taxpayer “investment” in K-12. Yet there’s silence regarding the structure of higher education spending. Instead politicians and educators claim a need to increase all of it. Why? So that more people can be exposed to college.

And yet a considerable percentage of the core requirements in our colleges and universities involve recreational expenditures as opposed to investment in human capital. Under the guise of enhancing critical thinking skills, students are sold expensive required courses in the Liberal Arts that result in little or no productive use. And if that education is not useful in the production of further goods or services it is a consumer good. It is recreational education. Paying for courses that students enjoy, but which create little or no further value to society are identical to paying for them to attend concerts, movies, plays, sporting events, or to travel. 

Colleges and universities make no distinction between an academic credit in Bio-Chem or in Music and Social Life, Plants in Folklore or Comics as Culture (all three are offered to satisfy expensive Arts & Humanities core requirements at “prestige” universities).

The institutions, and their accreditation agencies, for any number of reasons, are non-judgmental. Nor are the politicians who pour tax dollars into the support of students at those institutions. Liberal Arts faculties routinely argue that their various departments teach critical thinking skills. But even to the degree that exposure to the Arts and Humanities results in those skills, is no argument for a major in any one of those fields. It might make sense to enjoy survey courses in history, psychology, government, music/art appreciation, etc. to acculturate graduates a tad beyond K-12. But since strategic thinking is rigorously taught in the hard sciences, math, economics, engineering, business, and biological arenas, it’s not clear that Arts and Humanities majors are any better equipped in the erection of logical walls against emotional intrusion into the contributions their grads will make. Nor is there any evidence that their graduates are more malleable over their years of employment.

There’s a need for structural change as opposed to mere educational reform in taxpayer-supported education. Structural walls protecting recreational education’s claim upon large swaths of dollars that should be going to investment in human capital need to crumble. To some degree they are. Students and parents—the products of education—are becoming aware of the way labor markets value their lack of productive skills. 

Recreational education has value, just as theater, symphonies, films, videos, sports, novels, and other challenging consumer services do. And taxpayer dollars do subsidize some of those areas. However those subsidies, like PBS grants, are understood as mass entertainment or consumer expenditures and not pimped up under a bling of investments. We may not need more dollars for higher education, but rather a massive structural change in the way the many billions are now spent by taxpayers who are promised that graduates will be prepared to eat for a lifetime.      

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